My review of Paul Kingsnorth’s magnum opus Against the Grain raised a question: what responsibilities do writers or artists have to provide a vision? You may remember that I had complained that Kingsnorth provides a vivid condemnation of our current culture, but he doesn’t provide a compelling vision for those who might agree with his diagnosis. Should an artist be obligated to provide a solution to the problems they raised?

Strangely, my answer to the first question – “is it the responsibility of writers or artists to provide a “vision” – is “Yes,” while my answer to the second question – “should an artist be obligated to provide a solution to the problems they raise” – is “No.” I suppose that seems weird – aren’t they the same question? Not at all. The difference lies in the words I have formatted in bold. There’s a difference between a responsibility and an obligation, as there is between a vision and a solution.

A “vision” is a work of the imagination that describes an image of what might be, which may or may not include instructions about how to attain it; a “solution,” on the other hand, is an answer to a specific problem, and can be thought of as possessing the underlying form of a syllogism: if we do X, then Y will be changed. In other words, a vision is a description of a possible way of being: here’s what it might look or feel like to live a certain way. That description may be simply a portrayal of a way of treating each other. I think of the novels of Wendell Berry as examples of a vision of how we might live together.

Similarly, there is a difference between a “responsibility” and an “obligation.” A responsibility is something that is part of a role you have accepted – e.g., as a nurse, it is your responsibility to take care of the needs of your patient. An obligation comes with a specific task and is compelled from without – e.g., as a parolee, you are obligated to report to your parole officer once a week. To fail in a responsibility is to feel guilt; to fail in an obligation is to be punished. I think artists have a responsibility to, implicitly, allegorically, metaphorically show us a vision.

Kingsnorth, at least at one time shared this belief. In “The Dark Mountain Manifesto,” (2009), Kingsnorth and his co-author Dougald Hines wrote:

“We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling [from civilization]. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it… We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.” I sought to hold Kingsnorth accountable for having himself forgotten that responsibility.

Nevertheless, while a vision might be weak or lacking in Against the Machine, perhaps it could be argued that he provides a vision of “the process of decoupling” from civilization in his novels. Kingsnorth has written three, which are held in high regard: The Wake (2015); Beast (2017); and Alexandria (2020). I confess to having not read these novels, but I found their descriptions gave me a sense of Kingsnorth’s expressed vision.

The Wake is described as “a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past” in which Kingsnorth brings the “dire scenario” of the Norman Invasion of 1066 “back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear.”

Beast, part 2 in the trilogy, “plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on an empty moor in the west of England. What he has left behind we don’t yet know. What he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements, and something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession. This short, shocking, and exhilarating novel is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage, and the search for truth that continues the story set one thousand years earlier in Paul Kingsnorth’s bravura debut novel, The Wake.”

Finally, part 3, Alexandria: “One thousand years from now, a small religious community lives in what were once the fens of eastern England. They are perhaps the world’s last human survivors. Now they find themselves stalked by a force that draws ever closer, and that seems to have brought them to the brink of extinction. A force that offers them a promise and a threat: a place called Alexandria. Set in a time on the far side of an apocalypse, and perhaps on the verge of another, Paul Kingsnorth’s radical new novel is a work of matchless, mythic imagination. It is driven by elemental themes: community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man—and the tension between an unstable present and an unknown, unknowable future.”

What I gather from those short summaries of Kingsnorth’s vision is that, first, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a thousand years in the past, the present, or a thousand years in the future, it’s all post-apocalyptic all the time. It might be the personal apocalypse of war and invasion, the worldwide apocalypse of ecocide, or the threat of the end of humanity in a transhumanist future, but regardless it’s all bad. As he said in the Dark Mountain manifesto, artists should “rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.” His personal response is a vision of a world that is dire, violent, and dangerous, one in which human beings are isolated and alone. The enemy is “community,” “the mind,” and “the machine,” and the hero is “the self,” “the body,” and “man.” My impression is of a cross between the Mad Max movies and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a little of The Matrix thrown into the threat of transhumanism.

And I suppose if that’s your vision and you’ve spelled it out over the course of almost 1,000 pages, then there’s not much point in repeating it in Against the Machine. Of course, that assumes that everybody who read Against the Machine is well-acquainted with Kingsnorth’s oeuvre, which may not be the case. Nevertheless, it’s not like it takes a lot to figure out that, in the mind of Paul Kingsnorth, we’re all fucked and there’s nothing to be done about it except learn to survive within the inevitable violent chaos that ensues.

So perhaps my complaint is unjustified, and Kingsnorth does have a vision, it’s just an implied one that relies on simple subtraction to figure out: today minus modernity equals…well, in the end it still equals violence and ecocide, as The Wake shows, so I’m not certain what should motivate me to change my lifestyle by retreating to a small tract of land to subsistence farm without electricity or farm equipment. Maybe it’s the joys of a fireplace.

I don’t mean to be flip or dismissive, but ultimately I just don’t understand what would prompt someone to write an almost-400 page book (not to mention three lengthy novels) that basically says, echoing John Maynard Keynes' oft-misunderstood point, “in the long run we are all dead.” Is the purpose to persuade his readers to simply give up hope and live in fear and loathing? In the privacy of my mind, I have come to refer to such extreme pessimism as “Gollum Philosophy,” except in this case Kingsnorth clutches not a cursed ring, but rather, like Stephen Crane’s naked desert dweller, his own bitter heart, which he loves “because it is bitter / And because it is my heart.”

As Hamlet might have said had he shared Kingsnorth’s worldview, “the rest is violence."

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane, In the Desert

A few days ago, I finished reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, a compelling and powerfully written rejection of, basically, everything introduced into our culture since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

There is a prophetic streak in Kingsnorth that gives his writing a propulsive energy that is simultaneously bracing and abrasive that seems to have been present since at least his 2009 “Dark Mountain Manifesto,” co-written with Dougald Hine. “There is a fall coming,” they wrote.

“We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight – Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

Seventeen years later, their observations are, if anything, truer than ever, and as I read Against the Machine, I inwardly applauded Kingsnorth’s ability to condemn modern life with vigor and memorable imagery. It is a style of writing that I have encountered in another writer whose insights I admire, Chris Hedges, whose pit-of-hell despair I mostly find exhausting and debilitating. Which, in turn, leads me to question myself. Am I just an intellectual coward unwilling to look reality square in the face? Or is there something else preventing me from shouting “amen” after Kingsnorth swings his rhetorical sledgehammer at 21st-century society?

As someone who used as an epigraph on his blog Buckminster Fuller’s famous quotation, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” I admire that Kingsnorth walks his talk. He rejects much of modern technology, and consequently has withdrawn to a small homestead in rural Ireland where he does his best to live according to his anti-technological values. And yet, he doesn’t seem to be able to describe the joys and challenges of his chosen life in a way that might inspire others to follow his example. He seems much more comfortable railing “against the machine” than singing “for the earth.”

In her brilliant essay on Homer’s Iliad, the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil, to whom Kingsnorth alludes to admiringly more than once in Against the Machine, wrote about the concept of “force” that she finds at the center of the epic’s conflict. Weil defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” She goes on, “Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.” This could easily serve as a summary of Kingsnorth’s book. His focus is almost completely oppositional.

An oppositional focus tends to see society as being aggressive, as forcing things upon us. You can see this in the words he regularly uses to describe modern civilization. Our culture is “under attack” from the “Black Ships of the globalized economy,” and our very humanity is threatened by the advance of The Machine (always capitalized). we are “entirely enslaved,” both by the left and by global capitalism, which are"engines for destroying" customary ways of living." They even want to take away our fireplaces, which is the “latest blow against the home as the centre of the universe.” If you lose your fireplace, “you literally lose your focus as a culture.” Indeed, “Strip the last remaining fires from the last remaining hearths, and you are one step closer to what is perhaps the ultimate ambition of the Machine: the abolition of home…The home must go, so that the Machine might live.” Further: “any blow struck for the survival or the revival of the home and the family is an act of resistance and of rebuilding…The home can be a friction against the Machine. If this is a war, it is long past time to begin fighting back.” Electricity is an enemy. “D. H. Lawrence once said that the world changed forever when the first electric bulb was switched on. Today those bulbs obscure the very stars, and we cannot take our eyes off the screens.” Indeed, “the sacred and the digital not only don’t mix, but are fatal to each other.” Referencing his previous activisim in the movement against climate change, he says “Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the [vat-grown] sludge [for breakfast] and live in the pod…” Finally, “What Progress wants,” he asserts, “is the end of transcendance.”

I could keep this up for much longer, but you get the picture: Kingsnorth’s vision is eschatological.

To engage in prophetic imagination, which seems to be Kingsnorth’s intention, usually does involve a vivid description of the end times, or at least the end of a regime. However, according to Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination, probably one of the most influential books on the subject, there are two aspects of prophetic speech that both must be present. The first we might call the “descendant function,” which describes things that exist but ought not to. Kingsnorth has this one down cold. It’s the “ascendent function,” the description of things that do not exist but should, where Kingsnorth is weak. He has no strong vision for a possible future.

At best, his vision can best be described as being “free” of all the negative things he’d previously described in gruesome detail: free of cell phones, free of electricity, free of the global economy, free of the internet (although he admit that he must interact with that in order to get his work distributed, which is totally understandable), free of trans people (yeah, that chapter I find deeply offensive), in other words, well, free of The Machine. But that’s a subtraction story, not a vision.

The result of Kingsnorth’s book, even if one agrees (as I do) with many of his observations, is to leave one paralyzed in a defensive crouch and shaking one’s fist at the heavens in bitter despair with no vision of how one is to live other than Not That, which he renames “radical reaction.” And I think that is a refusal of prophetic responsibility. At the very least, he should help us grieve.

Says Brueggemann, “I believe that the proper idiom for the prophet in cutting through the royal numbness and denial is the language of grief, the rhetoric that engages the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. It is indeed their own funeral. I have been increasingly impressed with the capacity of the prophet to use the language of lament and the symbolic creation of a death scene as a way of bringing to reality what the king must see and will not. And I believe that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal arrangement.” Kingsnorth’s bitterness prevents lamentation, both his or ours.

In the face of despair, Brueggemann suggests three tasks for the prophet to undertake:

• to offer of symbols “that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable”

• “to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there

• to speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about “the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation”

He does this through what Brueggemann calls the “language of amazement” which, is the language of hope, and is based on “the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion.”

The language of hope and amazement is lyrical, metaphoric, not “explanatory and scientifically argumentative;” it must touch “the hopeless person at many different points.” And herein lies the tragedy of Paul Kingsnorth, I think.

Fewer than twenty years ago, “The Dark Mountain Manifesto” was filled with the language of amazement and hope, of lyricism and metaphor. There are long segments drawn from the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, quotes from Emerson, Joseph Conrad, Bertrand Russell, Philip Larkin, John Berger, to name just a few. “Our world is still shaped by stories,” they declare, rightly I believe, and while we “find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality,” there is an alternative:

“In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are.

“Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed. This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust. But there is one.

“The last taboo is the myth of civilisation.”

They go on, in words that sound like a call to action:

“We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it…We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.”

Now, seventeen years later, there are only furtive gestures in this direction to be found in Against the Machine. Instead of artists, Kingsnorth is now pointing toward philosophers, theologists, and cultural critics such as Paul the Apostle, G.K. Chesterton, René Guénon, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul. Oh, as always in books of this nature, Christopher Lasch. New Yorker writer Cal Revely-Calder fittingly and depressingly entitled his review of Kingsnorth’s book “A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope,” summarizing it as follows: “For years, Paul Kingsnorth was one of the most visible members of the green movement. Then he walked away from it. Now he wants us to walk away from everything else.” Wow.

Which leads me to echo, sadly and perhaps superficially, the minister of the iconic movie The Big Chill: where did Paul’s hope go? Perhaps the answer to my question is scattered throughout his books, essays, and novels written between 2009 and now, I don’t know. But if Against the Machine is Kingsnorth’s magnum opus, I’d say that, without hope, without a vision of the future that goes beyond “Run away!,” he runs the risk of being seen as an old man yelling at clouds.

“To assess political parties according to the criteria of truth, justice and the public interest, let us first identify their essential characteristics. There are three of these: 1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions. 2. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members. 3. The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit. Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian – potentially, and by aspiration.” – Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties

Every once in a while, I find myself reading intelligent Substack note after intelligent Substack note, and I think “Why am I avoiding this platform?” Then I subscribe to a few people and suddenly my inbox is overrun with every intellectual twitch a writer has, and I immediately unsubscribe each and every one, panting and sweating by the end as if I’d just averted the apocalypse.

We read so many negative stories about social media, so I wanted to share a positive one from David Byrne’s “Reasons to be Cheerful” newsletter: “Why an Indian Village Leader’s Welfare Reels Are Going Viral”.

When I first started blogging on Theatre Ideas in 2005, I was responding to a book that had been recommended to me whose title I have long forgotten but that had urged that academics write at least 15 minutes a day every day, which seemed like a good idea to me. I was seven years into my teaching career, had heaved a sigh of relief when I got tenure, and I was not interested in writing for academic journals. I had also read educator Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms which had recently come out. So I decided to blog at least 15 minutes a day. I ended up blogging much more than that. For seven years.

However, like all academics, especially at an undergraduate liberal arts university like mine that put an emphasis on teaching, I didn’t have a lot of time to write – I was teaching a lot of classes, many of them new preps, directing a play one semester a year, and serving on way too many committees. Nevertheless, I had lots of ideas in my head that I wanted to share. Very often, these ideas were reactive – responses to something someone else had written (“honey, I’ll be late for dinner, there’s someone who’s wrong on the internet”) or something I had read in a book that inspired me in some way. I’d sit down at my office desk with two hours available between my class and a committee meeting, have lunch and knock out something just to get the idea out of my head. Often, these posts (we called them posts back then, not “content”) were quite lengthy, sometimes as long as 2,500 words or more. I didn’t have time to research anything that couldn’t be pulled off of my office bookshelf, nor did I have time to edit and rewrite – I did both as I went.

When I look back at that writing today, I confess that I’m surprised at how well it stands up. Of course, I had my share of kneejerk clinkers, but much of what I wrote had energy, some degree of wit, a firm philosophical foundation, and at least some glimmer of insight. Plus they were kind of fun to read. At least to me.

Today when I write here on MB, things are different. Things are much more polite – to disagree with someone, which back then was de rigueur (“Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” was my blogging motto), is now almost unheard of – after all, that’s what X is for! But here, when there are comments, they are mostly of the “attaboy” type. I sort of miss the Intellectual give and take, although the out-and-out brawls got a little tiresome after a while. Sometimes, people took issue with what I wrote – can you believe it?

More importantly, now that I am not writing in response to an ongoing conversation (or battle), and my audience is minimal to say the least, I can take my time to think, research, edit, polish. At first, this was disorienting. I had a hard time recreating the propulsive, slashing style that once set me apart; I’d find my ideas would sort of droop onto the page and lie there, moping and mumbling. That wasn’t fun at all, I’d think, it’s got all the excitement of a bowling ball rolling slowly down the basement stairs. On the other hand, I was still being driven by a sense that I needed to provide a regular stream of, yes, “content” unless I wanted to be forgotten – not admitting that I had been forgotten for a long time now. It took a while but I finally realized that I was OK with that – that I really didn’t want to be part of an online controversy about anything anymore. Maybe that comes of being 68 – I don’t know.

What I’m finally starting to enjoy is just taking my time to let my ideas develop, to edit and polish, to publish only when I think I’ve said what I meant. I mean, this particular post is being written casually, but I have another one that I’m really working on – something apparently called an “effort post” these days, and it is an effort – a slow effort, but an effort nonetheless. A leisurely effort. It’s more like whittling than factory work. And because I have this time, I’m not giving my writing to a chatbot to correct the grammar or make suggestions for how to spice things up a little – I’m going to just do that myself, because that’s part of the fun. It’s like enthusiastic gardeners who even like weeding.

Kids, don’t try this at home – I’m a retired professional, and if you are hoping to generate income through your writing, you will starve taking my approach. You absolutely need to keep your intellectual knee jerking away non-stop, and I hope yout feelings won’t be hurt if I don’t read you. And in exchange, I won’t be hurt of you don’t read me. Deal?

Anyway, sometime in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be publishing something about Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. But not until I’m damn good and ready.

“Art, in the only sense in which one can separate art from technics [technology], is primarily the domain of the person; and the purpose of art, apart from various incidental technical functions that may be associated with it, is to widen the province of personality, so that feelings, emotions, attitudes, and values, in the special individualized form in which they happen in one particular person, in one particular culture, can be transmitted with all their force and meaning to other persons or to other cultures. Sympathy and empathy are the characteristic way of art: a feeling with, a feeling into, the innermost experiences of other men. The work of art is the visible, potable spring from which men share the deep underground sources of their experience. Art arises out of man’s need to create for himself, beyond any requirement for mere animal survival, a meaningful and valuable world: his need to dwell on, to intensify, and to project in more permanent forms those precious parts of his experience that would otherwise slip too quickly out of his grasp, or sink too deeply into his unconscious to be retrieved.” – Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (1952)

It seems to me that Mumford does two things in this paragraph: 1) he clearly defines a purpose for the arts, and 2) he provides a reason, almost 75 years ago, why AI is not a threat to the arts. The purpose is “to widen the province of personality, so that feelings, emotions, attitudes, and values, in the special individualized form in which they happen in one particular person, in one particular culture, can be transmitted with all their force and meaning to other persons or to other cultures.” AI does not have, nor ever will have, the personality – the feelings, emotions, attitudes, and values – of an individual person.

Put another way – and I am thinking specifically of the more corporatized arts of film and TV – if the work that you create can be successfully imitated by AI, you should understand that you are creating products, not works of art. You are not using a “special individualized form” of “one particular person,” but rather are using a well-worn formula to create content and not art. And if that is true, then you deserve to have your work supplanted by AI. You have become part of The Machine, and The Machine will eventually make you unnecessary.